If you have been following the development of Google Maps over the years, you are probably familiar with the Trekker, the backpack that includes a complete Street View camera setup for mapping anything from hikes into the Grand Canyon to walks through penguin colonies in Antarctica. Today, a new backpack is joining Google’s mapping tools: the Cartographer for indoor mapping.

The curtain slips a bit in the Camera in the Mirror, a new Tumblr project by the Spanish artist Mario Santamaría that collects accidental self-portraits of Google’s hulking cameras while they go about their work. It turns out that museums have a lot of mirrors, and the cameras often photograph themselves in front of them.
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We’re thrilled to announce that Skybox Imaging has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Google!
Five years ago, we began the Skybox journey to revolutionize access to information about the changes happening across the surface of the Earth.
We’ve made great strides in the pursuit of that vision.
We’ve built and launched the world’s smallest high­-resolution imaging satellite, which collects beautiful and useful images and video every day. We have built an incredible team and empowered them to push the state­-of­-the-­art in imaging to new heights. The time is right to join a company who can challenge us to think even bigger and bolder, and who can support us in accelerating our ambitious vision.

Google's self-driving cars can tour you around the streets of Mountain View, California.
I know this. I rode in one this week. I saw the car's human operator take his hands from the wheel and the computer assume control. "Autodriving," said a woman's voice, and just like that, the car was operating autonomously, changing lanes, obeying traffic lights, monitoring cyclists and pedestrians, making lefts. Even the way the car accelerated out of turns felt right.

April 2014

The light that a city emits is like its glowing fingerprint. From the orderly grid of Manhattan, to the sprawling, snaking streets of Milan, to the bright contrast of Kuwait’s ring-roads, each city leaves its own pattern of tiny glowing dots. See if you can ID these cities based on the way they shine.

I introduced an element of randomness into a recent map design. Misplaced buildings and overlapping areas of texture bring energy and excitement to the experience of viewing a map. The end result is a little disorienting, but still mostly familiar: